1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates generally to thermal profiles and in particular to thermal profiles for processors. Still more particularly, the present application relates a computer implemented method, data processing system, and computer usable code for generation of a hardware thermal profile for a multi-core system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The first-generation Cell processor is a multi-core chip comprised of a 64-bit Power PC® processor core and eight synergistic processor cores, capable of massive floating point processing, optimized for compute-intensive workloads and broadband rich media applications. A high-speed memory controller and high-bandwidth bus interface are also integrated on-chip. Cell's breakthrough multi-core architecture and ultra high-speed communications capabilities deliver vastly improved, real-time response, in many cases ten times the performance of the latest PC processors. Cell is operating system neutral and supports multiple operating systems simultaneously. Applications for this type of processor range from a next generation of game systems with dramatically enhanced realism, to systems that form the hub for digital media and streaming content in the home, to systems used to develop and distribute digital content, and to systems to accelerate visualization and supercomputing applications.
Today's high performance multi-core processors are frequently limited by thermal considerations. Typical solutions include cooling and power management. Cooling may be expensive and/or difficult to package. Power management is generally a coarse action, “throttling” much if not all of the processor in reaction to a thermal limit being reached. Other techniques such as thermal management help address these coarse actions by only throttling the units exceeding a given temperature. Even with the improvement of thermal management, it would be beneficial for the system to have a method of profiling an application to prevent the processor from being throttled.